X.COM on the Path to Profitability

Pesala

reluctant to move to Mastodon / Discord or similar platforms simply for fear of losing audience.

It is well known that

Disinformation is the problem of our times, but it is not new. If the MSM media is what you read, you are easily misled.

A lie gets around the world before the truth has the time to get its pants on. (Sir Winston Churchill).

terepashi

I doubt that most of their users will start paying if they decide to paywall the entire site. Some definitely will (though I think most of them already do pay); I don't see how this wouldn't drive the advertisers away again or get them to lower their bids (considering, well, even fewer eyes). Which is probably how they'll still be making most of their money.

Admittedly, I dislike that site. So I'm biased towards hoping that it burns out. It'd be very funny if this turned into another MySpace, limping along forever, not dead, but not really knowing what to do with itself, slowly being forgotten.

Ayespy

@Pesala said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

Disinformation is the problem of our times, but it is not new.

Still, some people combat it, and some promote it. MSM, for all its faults, and all the demonization against it that has become so popular of late, is not a promoter of disinfo on the whole. Yes, they mis-emphasize, sensationalize, scandalize, promote conflict, (all to attract eyeballs and the money that follows) but they don't make up fantasy outright, lie every day, every hour on the hour, as do the majority of "alternative" media, and they don't consciously promote hatred.

I have been a vociferous critic of the MSM for the last 50 years, but I accurately asses my adversary, and it is not an unabashed disinformation machine. When taken to task, it adjusts course. (Fox et al do not qualify as MSM).

Under Musk, "X" has become a haven for both (disinfo and hatred). That doesn't make him a "bad man." It does make him a "bad manager." Defense of his missteps in this arena are ill-considered. One must assess one's idols with clear eyes.

Ayespy

@Pesala said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

A lie gets around the world before the truth has the time to get its pants on. (Sir Winston Churchill).

This is a 1710 (earliest citation) quote that passed through a couple of dozen authors in different forms before it reached Churchill.

Its most popular version is "by Mark Twain" (who cannot be proved to have said or written it) and goes: "...a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on." This was attributed to him in 1919. He died in 1910 without having left evidence that he authored it.

Pesala

@Ayespy said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

Yes, they mis-emphasize, sensationalize, scandalize, promote conflict, (all to attract eyeballs and the money that follows)

What is that, if not disinformation?

but they don't make up fantasy outright, lie every day, every hour on the hour, as do the majority of "alternative" media, and they don't consciously promote hatred.

On x.com, members are free to post anything that is legal in their country. X does not promote conspiracy theories; on the contrary, they de-emphasise it. They also offer community notes to call out disinformation. To lump all members of X together as liars and conspiracy theorists is defamatory.

Other social media platforms, and the former Twitter, actively censor opinions that are contrarian. If no one is allowed to state an unpopular POV, that is not free speech. If anyone posts something defamatory, of course, they can be sued, but they should be free to say it on an open platform.

When Elon took over Twitter, many here said it would fail. They will probably be proved wrong within a year, when it is making good money.

Ayespy

@Pesala Disinformation is an active intelligence technique. It is knowing lies to manipulate an adversary into self-harm to the benefit of the teller. It's not mere sensationalism. It's intentional and knowing harm. Permitting this on a platform is tacit consent to that harm. Promulgators of disinformation are treating everyone who is not their ally, as their puppet or their enemy. This is the act of a personality that believes they can only be strong if others are weak. They can only be safe if others are on defense. They can only succeed if other fail. It is a social cancer.

Ayespy

@Pesala Misinformation is lying irrespective of knowledge or intent. Disinformation is lying with knowledge, and with intent to harm.

Pesala

@Ayespy said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

Permitting this on a platform is tacit consent to that harm.

I accept that it is the right of everyone to believe in an imaginary being who created the Universe. It is a very harmful belief that I cannot condone. I do not therefore tacitly consent to their harm.

The problem is, who gets to decide what is accurate information, and what is disinformation? Read the Twitter files and the Hunter Biden laptop story and how the FBI got involved on the former Twitter.

ugly

To refer to sensationalization and click-chasing of the mainstream media as disinformation on one hand, and then point to the Twitter files on the other hand to describe accurate information being suppressed is a bizarre take. The people behind the Twitter Files - Taibbi, Shellenberger and Weiss - are nothing but click-chasing, fabulists that claim to be independent investigators. They regularly promote unverified and unsourced information. They have promoted climate change denialism, UFO conspiracies, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2, including completely fabricating a story about patient zero. They are media manipulators.

Releasing cherry-picked internal communications to sensationalize the benign is an age-old disinformation tactic. We've seen it with climate change denialism. We've just seen it again with the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and the Twitter Files is more of the same.

Ayespy

@Pesala said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

...who gets to decide what is accurate information, and what is disinformation?

There is nothing to decide. Thigs are true or they are not. False claims are mistaken, or they are malicious. They are not potentially true.

I have the benefit of working in a field where opinion is irrelevant. Everything is provable truth, provable falsity, or yet-to-be-proved. Opinion or belief are not in any case truth. They are only opinion and belief. There is no voice of authority which determines truth or falsity. There is only what is.

But the great tragedy here is the erroneous monotone assignment of importance to fact and opinion (or alternative "fact") - and the parallel fact that lies fed to and accepted by people cause blindness and stupidity. So lying to people is, defacto, harm. (It can be harm by mistake or by intent.)

But truth is discerned by direct perception. The lies fed to and accepted by a person can inhibit or prohibit that perception.

Pesala

@Ayespy said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

Misinformation is lying irrespective of knowledge or intent.

In my book, lying requires intent to deceive, even if only for a moment, as in telling jokes.

Misinformation is just something that is false or imperfect due to incomplete knowledge, or lack of context.

If someone expresses an opinion that is contrary to widely held beliefs, they are accused of spreading disinformation.

There is nothing to decide

You have already decided that you know truth from falsehood, but you may be misinformed or deluded. We are not talking about flat-earthers here, but opinions and beliefs that many take to be the truth, such as Elon Musk is an anti-Semite, condones conspiracy theories, etc.

Ayespy

@Pesala said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

You have already decided that you know truth from falsehood,

Not true. I have decided that it is knowable what is or is not true. Things can be perceived or demonstrated. A concatenation of facts can serve to demonstrate a fact one did not directly observe (a 10-inch intrusion across the front of a 1995 Kia Sportage is demonstrative of a 30-mph delta V even if you were not looking at the speedo in the Kia when the accident happened). But I also can acknowledge what I don't know, without at the same time claiming it is unknowable - or that those persons whose livelihood consists of direct observation of the evidence couldn't possibly know it any better than a political commentator with an agenda to push.

Pesala

Ben Shapiro Talks to Elon Musk

Free Speech, ADL and Anti-Semitism

Ayespy

@Pesala Ben Shapiro is a major king of disinformation and toxic content. There is no chance that a conversation between him and Musk could produce any valid and informative data. You could hardly have posted a less productive link.

https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing

Pesala

@Ayespy Ben Shapiro seems to be a very successful Jewish journalist. How about listening to the dialog instead of denigrating the speakers?

He seems to be just the kind of free speech advocate who would upset the liberal left.

Ayespy

@Pesala Shapiro is not a journalist. He is an advocate. As to whether he is "successful," there are two potential measures: Whether he makes money - he does. Whether he swings opinion to the position of his advocacy - he does not. Whether he is Jewish is an open question. Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro would hold that he is not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKRSiqBWqNM

It is not his identity as a "source" that defeats his credibility, but rather his content.

ugly

@Ayespy said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

@Pesala Shapiro is not a journalist. He is an advocate.

That is a generous description. He is better described as a provocateur, a reactionary, or a media manipulator. Anyone who presents themselves as a 'free speech advocate' is usually a big red flag. They are not actually interested in free speech. What they are interested in is polluting the discourse, or 'flooding the zone with shit'.

Watch Linda Yaccarino’s wild interview at the Code Conference

Yaccarino sounded rattled. She’d found out earlier in the day that Kara Swisher, a Code Conference co-founder, had booked a surprise guest to appear an hour before her: Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. He has been an outspoken critic of the direction Elon Musk has taken the site.

In his interview with Swisher, Roth recounted how Musk put him personally in danger. Musk suggested on Twitter that Roth had advocated for sexualizing children — a completely unfounded claim — which led to death threats and his address being posted online. “I had to sell my house. I had to move,” Roth said. He encouraged Yaccarino to think about how Musk could turn on her, too, and said the site was bleeding users and advertisers.

I suppose unfounded claims about a person sexualizing children is just good old free speech.

Elon Fires Half Of ExTwitter’s Election Integrity Team, Because A Manager Liked A Tweet Calling Him A F-ing Dip-

Indeed, reports show that the only times Twitter was actually removing information regarding elections was in the most extreme circumstances, such as cases where you had people impersonating election officials on Twitter in an attempt to mislead voters into not voting (such as by telling them the election was on a different day), or where there were out and out frauds.

That kind of thing is still really important.

But apparently not to Elon Musk. Earlier this week it was reported that exTwitter had disabled the feature that let users “report” election misinformation as part of its reporting tools. That already got some people worried about how a Musk-run exTwitter would handle many upcoming elections.

As if to confirm this was absolutely intentional, that same day, the Information revealed that Elon fired half of the remaining “Election Integrity Team” at exTwitter. This is despite him recently promising to expand that effort. Rolling Stone has way more info on all of this, including details about what likely happened here and it’s dumber than you could have imagined.

It began, as so much nonsense does these days, with gullible Elon falling for complete and utter nonsense peddlers on his own site. A month ago, Aaron Rodericks, who worked on the “threat disruption” team, and is a holdover from pre-Elon Twitter, announced that he was hiring 8 new people for civic integrity and elections work:
Again, this work is not about “censoring,” but about actually understanding various threats to actual elections (not just garden variety political misinfo) and figuring out ways to counter them.

But the nonsense peddlers on exTwitter that have Elon’s ear convinced him that it was a sneaky plot behind Elon’s back… supported with “evidence” that Aaron had, at times, liked some tweets that mocked Elon and Linda Yaccarino.

In a quote tweet, Benz replied to Raichik’s sarcastic question: “No, it’s being run by Yoel Roth’s former colleague, who still somehow works at X despite appearing to think Musk is a ‘f-ing dip-’ — His name is Aaron Rodericks.” In the post, Benz shared screenshots of his many recent criticisms of Rodericks on the platform. In those tweets, Benz called Rodericks one of CEO Linda Yaccarino’s “censorship shills” and noted that Rodericks had apparently liked another user’s tweet using the aforementioned epithet to describe Musk.

Again, remember that for all of Elon’s talk about “free speech” on his platform, and a promise to fund any lawsuit for someone fired for their activities on exTwitter, he has a thing where he is very quick to fire any employee who even hints at not wanting to lick his boots.

The free speech warriors also tend to have the thinnest skin.

ingolftopf

@ugly
Thank you for this information.
It seems quite credible to me and fits into the picture.

ingolftopf

This post is deleted!

ingolftopf

@Pesala said in X.COM on the Path to Profitability:

A lie gets around the world before the truth has the time to get its pants on. (Sir Winston Churchill).

Whether by Mark Twain or Winston Churchill, a wonderful quote.

But, like every quote, it also runs the risk of being occupied.

I don't think either of them would ever have used it pro Elon Musk.